Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.

Youth, what a pity to waste it on the young.

If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you area red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!

There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.

Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.